


This is a Place Where Your Gods Can't Dwell

by Canarii



Category: Caprica (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Female Friendship, Gen, Other, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-07
Updated: 2011-12-07
Packaged: 2017-10-27 01:07:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/289898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canarii/pseuds/Canarii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Creator. Destroyer. Avenging Angels or two lost girls?</p>
            </blockquote>





	This is a Place Where Your Gods Can't Dwell

Zoe built a citadel out of garbage. She turned rust into towering redwoods, changed graffiti into sandstone walls that stretched a mile high. Sewers into springs, filthy rainwater made clear as it fell from new heights into the churning river below. She turned New Cap City inside out and constructed a verdant paradise out of trash. A brave new world just for them, the two of them, digital goddess-sisters in zeros and ones.

When it was all done, and Zoe turned to her with expectant eyes glowing with the light of pure creation, Tamara said nothing. Zoe grabbed her hand with all the quivering excitement of the sixteen year old whose bones she'd been crafted out of.

"You and me", she breathed in the cool mountain air, fingers that felt warm curled around Tamara's, cradled by hands that seemed real if not for the lack of a pulse beating at the slender wrist. Her fingers responded in turn, tracing the lines of Zoe's palm with all the thoughts she won't speak aloud.

Because she still hates Zoe Graystone, she just can't live without her anymore.

***

Zoe says they're the same, constructed from the same inspired code if not crafted by the same hands. Tamara knows this isn't true, because she couldn't look to 'Original Tamara' as equal parts mother, sister, self and god the way Zoe does. She is Tamara Adams, sixteen years old, walking dead girl. She has no heartbeat, and no legacy to carry on but her own.

They're nothing alike. Because Tamara doesn't want paradise. She had her city, and Zoe planted it over with trees and valleys.

It was grim, and merciless, and leaking out every corner with filth and sin and all the worst bits of human nature. But it was _hers_. She'd conquered it, branded her ownership on walls and gutters and windows. She was its mistress, the queen of the surface streets. She was it's grey, unbeating heart, and it loved her. It's rats and lost souls worshipped her with twice the primal reverence Zoe had for her God, because Tamara was the master of the solitary force that ran the dark world of New Cap City. Death.

She was its avatar and host, embraced the blood and soot and let it seep under her skin. She only looked like a teenage girl, and she was nothing like Zoe. Because Zoe could only create, and Tamara could only destroy.

***

Tamara had never even hit anyone. All her life, her real life, that is, she'd been a good girl. Loved her family, worked hard at school. She'd never done anything to hurt anyone, and it wasn't fair. Then Zoe's program had dragged her screaming up out of her premature grave into a world where nothing made sense, and good girls finished last. She fought for her life, and then, she fought for her death. She dealt blood to any who crossed her path because no amount of weeping would wake her up.

And she _liked_ it. They weren't real people, they didn't bleed, didn't scream. They just flickered out of her city with an anguished explosion of pixels, one by one expelled from her kingdom of grit and code.

Zoe bled. She bled a lot when Tamara put that first shotgun round into her chest. It bubbled thick and black over her clothing, onto the sand, spilling onto the arena as she gasped and whimpered with shock and pain. Tamara thought she should feel sick, but instead felt only a twisted rush as she stood over her crippled adversary. Her murderer, her sister, her other half. She wanted to press a death kiss to the wound and paint her lips dark and wetly cherry with Zoe's blood. But instead, she just loaded another shell and aimed the barrel at the center of the other girl's forehead.

"Guess what, you found me."

 _Absolution._

 

***

She was Tamara. But she wasn't. She was herself and something new all at once. And that someone was suddenly turned off by the jeering of the crowds above. Who were they to call for her blood? Blood she'd already spilt in excess for her streets and alleyways. The screeching animals above were walking in her city; they needed to be reminded of that.

The sand is off her back, and broken, bloodied fingers, shaking, find their way to her own. She glances down at her own savaged hands, broken fingernails and gravel imbedded in scraped knuckles, and something changes. Something tired and weeping and raw tenderly lets her hand fit into Zoe's as they looked up at the crowds with all the defiance of gods.

***

She let Zoe take apart her city. She said nothing, but silently pulled down the walls so her sister-goddess-enemy could fill in the empty spaces with trees and water. She didn''t protest, and she didn't argue. Not because she was afraid (dead girls have nothing to fear), and she sure as hell didn't believe in Zoe's cause. But it's that mad look in the other girl's eyes. The burning mania that comes across her features as she talked about the filth of V-World, her purpose, her God.

It reminds Tamara that there's something not quite right about Zoe Graystone. Although, whether that beautiful madness was part of her design or created along the way from digital debris and bits lost in translation, she couldn't know. Either way, Tamara can't pull away, doesn't want to, too transfixed by her insane avenging angel to raise a word of protest.

***

Zoe's world is quiet, barely disturbed by the sounds of digital birdsong and rushing water. It doesn't suit Tamara much, who misses the buzz of the smoke and machinery that had run her lost city. Zoe notices her restlessness, and builds Tamara a bedroom with vaulted ceilings and stained glass windows that let in too much light. She etches Tamara's flowered T over the bed, in innocent ignorance of what the symbol meant. The room's too bright, the bed's too big, and neither of them sleep anyway. But it's the thought that counts.

Their secret place to hide away, it's too quiet when neither of them have much of anything to say to each other. They lie over the covers on Tamara's bed, and Zoe draws constellations on the ceiling, trying to teach Tamara to do the same.

"Just breathe", she says, "And imagine you're painting."

Tamara does. The ceiling cracks.

She bites back soundless tears and tightens her hand in Zoe's. The other girl gently leans her chin against Tamara's shoulder and rubs her thumb over her knuckles soothingly. Creation is a gift she can't share, it seems.

It occurs to Tamara that Zoe doesn't talk about her 'purpose' anymore. No further mention has been made of what help Tamara had been supposed to give her on her way. And the heartless digital dead girl realizes that maybe the abandoned ghost at her side was simply achingly lonely.

***

Zoe talks, and Tamara listens.

About her family, her mission, her God. One time Tamara interjects, demanding to know how Zoe could possibly love a God whose name they’d both been slaughtered in.

Zoe seems confused.

“Original Zoe died, not me”, she says, “And Ben was led astray, that bombing wasn’t part of God’s plan.”

Tamara doesn’t say it, but she doesn’t think she would have liked Original Zoe that much.

***

“Let them come.”

Tamara watches her with the first bit of uncertainty she’d felt in a very long time. Their sanctuary had been breached, and even behind their high walls, the world felt violated, just knowing that the Graystones were out there in the woods, slowly trying to weed their lost daughter out.

 _You can’t have her._

***

“I have to go alone.”

“Why?”

“They’re her- my parents. I need to settle this myself.” Tamara shakes her head in protest. She doesn’t want to let Zoe out of her sight, she feels like she’s fading and it scares her. She’s Tamara but she’s not, she used to be a good girl and she used to be a killer and now she’s…what? She was the Destroyer to Zoe’s Creater, maybe they couldn’t even exist without each other.

“You might need me.”

“You’re safer if they don’t know about you”, Zoe says, reaching between them and finding Tamara’s hand, delicate fingers that fit perfectly together without a thrum of a beating pulse.

Tamara shakes her head again, but she says nothing more. Zoe squeezed her hand gently, and leaned in, brushing chocolaty bangs away to press a kiss to the center of Tamara’s forehead.

“I’ll be back for you.” She promises, and Tamara doesn’t know how to say she’s worried she won’t be here when Zoe does.

***

Tamara watches from the high walls, throat tight and body tensed. She’s frozen, paralyzed. Waiting.

Shots ring out in the valley below and her hands tense into fists instantly. They can’t die, but they can bleed, and they can hurt. She feels like she’s on the verge of tears without explanation. What had she become?

She unfurls her fingers, nails scraping against the sandstone, and brushing-

A flower. A single golden bud that had sprung up from between the cracks where her fingers had laid a moment before. The bloom bobbed slightly in the breeze, curled at an angle with two long leaves that made it almost look like a T.

Tamara laughs. Softly, tiny at first, then bubbling into something long and rich that echoed all along the watchtower with the promise of the city she would build here, clean and beautiful and reaching for the sky.


End file.
